The Dangers of (Mis)Reading: Tolkien, Naming, and Abstraction

I think I first saw it in a headline. “Palantir,” a name right out of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was now in a headline and it was the name of…a tech company?

If you need to brush up on your Tolkien, a Palantir, is a “seeing stone,” a sort of crystal ball that allows one to potentially see the future. I say “potentially” because looking into a Palantir could also be misleading or even lead to the viewer being consumed by the desire for power, especially if someone evil were controlling the other side. That is exactly what happens to Saruman, a powerful wizard who is corrupted by Sauron through a Palantir.

So, again, what idiot would name his tech company Palantir?

A Tolkien fan, it turns out.

A recent New York Times article explains not just the origins of the company Palantir but also that this kind of naming is a trend: Tolkien fans tend to be techies and they tend to bring names from that world into this one. Two more examples are Narya Capital, a venture-capital firm (Narya is one of the Elven rings in Tolkien—not exactly under the power of the one ring but also bound to it). And Anduril, “an artificial-intelligence military start-up” (Anduril is the name of the re-forged sword of Aragorn, who becomes King of Gondor).

I have many thoughts, perhaps the first of which is, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, “You keep using these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.”

Except they do know. These names come from some of Tolkien’s biggest purported fans, among them J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. These are men who have read Tolkien’s books, who cite them as being formative and important to shaping the men they have become. And so they have given names from Tolkien’s books to their companies.

What’s the problem?

As the Times article explains, Tolkien was at best ambivalent toward technology, which in his lifetime always seemed to be bent toward power and beyond, to war. So a company named Palantir that “builds technology to bring the United States and partners quantum leaps ahead in capability” and one called Narya that uses “technology and science to solve for the future” do not seem to be paying attention.

Boys, what books were you reading?

Really, the disconnect is stark, which leads me to wonder about problems with both how we read and how we name.

One problem that this naming trend exemplifies is what I’m going to call dissociating: not recognizing that the concept in a fictional world can translate to this world. It’s the problem of reading a book like To Kill a Mockingbird and then having no empathy for George Floyd. When you completely dissociate what you read, the ideas in fictional worlds remain locked in those worlds.

Scripture and literature aren’t the same, but this issue reminds me of the James quote about “someone who looks at his face in the mirror, and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (James 1:23-24). Good novels, too, can hold up a mirror of a kind to us or open a window of insight to our world.

But does Tolkien do this, by creating a world with orcs and elves and hobbits and wizards? Or since it’s fantasy can we dissociate his world and use it to name our tech companies?

Tolkien has long been criticized for being too black and white. There are only “goodies” and “baddies” in his world, goes the argument—much too simplistic for the complex morality we live in. Thus, it’s too easy to see ourselves as the heroes, as Frodo or Aragorn, and too hard to see ourselves as an orc or even Saruman.

Sure, it’s human nature to see yourself as the good guy. But Christians especially should know better. Maybe this is why Christian literature profs remain such big fans of Flannery O’Connor generation after generation. O’Connor’s work holds up a mirror to ourselves to show the “grotesques” that we tend to become.

But that’s true in Tolkien, too. A good reader of Tolkien will not simply see him or herself as “on a hero’s journey” as Marc Andreessen apparently does. Instead, a good reader also realizes there is the potential for evil in himself—that he could become Boromir, or even Gollum, but especially Saruman. Saruman as a character illustrates that age-old temptation we have for knowledge—knowledge that comes, in Tolkien’s story, through the Palantir.

Using names from Tolkien’s world for tech companies may illustrate a deeper literary problem, one of interpretation. Who gets to interpret what Narya and Anduril and Palantir really mean? Who gets to say that they’re names that shouldn’t be transported to our world? After all, if a term only exists in a fantasy universe, can that term be unethically twisted?

One way to answer this question is through Tolkien himself. In the Times article, Michiko Kakutani makes this argument by referring to authorial intent. By looking at what Tolkien thought about technology (he had an “aversion,” she says, for “machine-worshippers”), it’s pretty clear he would not approve.

But Tolkien died in 1973 so we can’t ask him. In literary theory, something called “the death of author” says author intention doesn’t matter anyway. Once an author has written their work, they don’t control or have the final say over the meaning. Their writing may come into a world where it could mean something quite different from what they intend.

There are pros and cons to the “death of the author” principle. On the one hand, it allows literature to be useful beyond one moment in time. We can read The Great Gatsby and use it to think about wealth and power today. On the other hand, “death of the author” allows for lifting meanings out of texts that could be counter to the point. Hitler is said to have read a line of Nietszche that included the image “splendid blonde beast” and took it to mean the Aryan race. “One wonders what might have happened,” writes Meghan O’Gieblyn, “had Nietzsche simply written ‘lion.’”

I doubt that the men using names from Tolkien’s world are consciously thinking about “the death of the author.” I think of it instead as a kind of doublespeak.

In George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, doublespeak is the way language can be bent by power. In that book Big Brother changes the meanings of words through slogans like “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Doublespeak, then, is willfully changing the meanings of words.

Words bending in proximity to power is never far from us. Consider the meaning of the word “sex” in the Bill Clinton scandal. Or consider the term “refugee” when applied to Afrikaners more recently.

But it seems like politics is intervening in the dictionary at an even faster pace today. When I teach a line from the 1917 novel My Antonia about starting “an American graveyard that will be more liberal-minded,” I now feel compelled to tell students that in context “liberal” means open-minded in a good, very American sort of way.

By attaching names from Tolkien’s work that stood for very different things compared to the companies they have started, this practice of naming has much more in common with Tolkien’s villains than with Tolkien himself. And that feels like doublespeak.

But there’s one more way of separating words and ideas that comes to mind in this practice, something I will call “abstracting.” Really, this is another version of dissociating, but I think it’s both one that Christians are especially susceptible too and one of the primary lessons that literature can teach us. It’s captured in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

At the point when Jesus tells the story, an expert in this law has just asked how to inherit eternal life, to which Jesus answers, love God and neighbor. Because his question has come off as too simple and obvious, the lawyer follows up with, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus could have answered with a definition. “Your neighbor is everyone in need,” for example. Jesus’ story, however, makes it specific. Who shows neighbor-love to a specific, beaten down man in a dangerous situation? Not a priest. Not a Levite. A Samaritan.

I personally find it easier to love my neighbors in the abstract, to write a check to an aid agency who will use it to affect people on the other side of the world who are, in fact, also my neighbors.

“Love is never abstract,” Wendell Berry writes in “Word and Flesh.” “It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, ‘the least of these my brethren.’”

When we twist the meanings of words, we get doublespeak; when we separate word from idea—so far that we can’t see the problems in front of us—we abstract.

Love itself can become just an abstraction—except as it turns into loving action, except as it becomes carnate. This is why the incarnation is so amazing, the word of God becoming flesh and pitching his tent among us. Talk about specific.

We live in a time where many people, Christians included, are doing violence to words—twisting them, disconnecting them from their original context. Think Christian nationalism.

Names are powerful things that can distort and stretch us in particular ways. Perhaps most of all, high-concept names like Palantir, Narya, and Anduril take our eyes off the values of the Shire, which Tolkien was really after in his books. “If more of us valued good cheer and song above hoarded gold,” says the dying gold-hoarder Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, “it would be a merrier world.”

In The Lord of the Rings, those hobbit values expand some, to principles one might call doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly. The way that Sam and Frodo did those things was anything but abstract.

Boys, what books were you reading? Beware high-concept names that take our eyes off the Shire, off loving particular neighbors, or off the flaws in ourselves.